Is Link Building Pretty Much Irrelevant Now?
-
When I ask this, I am not under the illusion that links do nothing. I am more curious if from an SEO strategy perspective is executing a link building campaign a really unwise use of time and resources? Currently my company literally has every single one of our SEO clients ranked on page 1 rank 1 for their most high value keyword and in the top 5 results for another 5 to 10 high value keywords. we have almost done no link building for these clients. I mean we have established a handful of really good links, but thats it. I look at some competitors link profiles and they have hundreds yet our clients sites are outranking them.
I am almost at the point of not implementing link building initiatives. I mean we will still establish high quality links as they naturally present themselves, but as far as investing time and resources building links i am leaning towards not even doing that anymore or atleast for a while to see what the effect will be.
We seem to find better results when we spend our time building great additional pages and following all web best practices.
Just curious as to what other think?
Thanks SEOmoz Community!
-
Build links to your blog post, not to your home page. Also, I use Hootsuite to put the same blog post one rotation, ie I tweet,fb, g+ the same post multiple times.
I guess maybe I have an unfair advantage in that I market a site that already has authority. There are many subjects in the webinar on this. The webinars are included in your SEOMOZ subscription: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars
-
The responses to this question have been great. While I have written some very good content, I have learned that "if you build it, they will come" doesn't necessarily apply to writing content.
My question is, once the content is written, what are the best ways of getting it "out there?"
-
it's not one that I would recommend to a client or present as a link building strategy
I agree, I would not recommend it to most clients because most clients are not able to produce best-on-the-web content. If they are producing pedestrian content this approach is not going to work.
SEO is about accelerating and amplifying that process for maximum results.
I agree here too. I could make more money by promoting the articles, but I would rather spend my time producing content.
Once you have hundreds or even thousands of high quality pages on your site then you have a level of momentum that would be hard to reproduce with linkbuilders - especially after they have been working for a few years and picked all of the low-hanging links.
-
I have a hard time selling the "pay me to make friends in your industry" bit, so I hardly do it for clients anymore either. Making content for clients is a tangible asset that is
A. Easier to sell
B. A great long-term strategy on its own
-
I'm sure that's a strategy that can work over time, but it's not one that I would recommend to a client or present as a link building strategy.
Great content attracts links and improve in rankings over time. That's the way the web works. SEO is about accelerating and amplifying that process for maximum results.
-
LOL! I haven't done link building in over 1 year. Once in a while I'll write a guest blog post with a link pointing back, but about once per month.
I weathered all Panda and Penguin updates. I still get links from other companies, but I don't make much effort building links.
What you are saying happens exactly to me.
-
I've not done any linkbuilding for five or six years.
I publish content that is usually one of the best pages on the web for its topic. Those pages rank deep in the SERPs at first but slowly climb and in a year I check and they are often at or near the top of the SERPs.
Each one of those pages pulls in more daily traffic and as you get more pages up, more people see your stuff and that gets you exposure for likes, links, tweets, stumbles, etc.
It is really really slow to get that started but once you do it builds its own momentum.
-
WEBBY! Nice topic. Let me share something. My clients have great rankings too. Yes there is always room for improvement, but how much? Get a REAL Google Analytics report to uncover opportunity.
In addition, look at your incoming traffic. I told my clients that I have to stop being so dependent on Google because a change in their algorithm can cause a dip in traffic. I started changing focus from link building to relationship building. Some call it community building, some build their Fabebook/Twitter account. I help individuals and try getting them to grow so I can get my clients repeat business. That's the key on my end, repeat business.
-
It depends on what you mean by "link building".
If you're talking about going out and submitting your site to directories, commenting on blogs & forums, getting profile links, or otherwise manually "building" links in any shape or form, that is probably not the best use of your time (although some of those tactics can still work in moderation).
But there are still plenty of high value link building tactics. Having good content is great, but it won't do anything for your if people don't know about it. Putting that content in front of key bloggers & influencers in order to drive traffic and links is link building, and very much relevant. Forming partnerships with other top sites in your niche and linking to each other is good link building. Guest posting on high authority sites is good link building. Sending targeted press releases to journalists to get news mentions is good link building.
You're right that quality beats quantity when it comes to links, but you still need some kind of strategy to go about acquiring those high value links that goes beyond "building additional great pages". That's link building.
-
Hi Webby,
Interesting observation there. I've been doing very little link building and my clients also rank well. I am relatively new to the industry so I cant really offer much input. However, your post makes me feel better as I was noticing the very same thing. I'd like to hear what others have to say.
Thanks for posting this question.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Contextual links (is this screen shot considered contextual /editorial links ?)
Hello, Is the screen shot below considered contextual ?https://imgur.com/a/mrbQq and does it have any value or no value What is the value on a scale from 0 to 10 (if you know) of a contextual link versus non contextual links. Thank you, mrbQq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Rank Without any back linking ?
Hello, I am thinking , I will rank my site without SEO . I will add quality content on my site . Will not do any backlinking ! Can anyone suggest me if it is really possible. I know some guys or some websites those are ranked without any SEO attempts. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | businessowner0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Link Building, when to give up on a possible backlink provider
Hello, I'm doing content marketing, it's working but it's slow and steady. I'm looking for some wisdom here from people that have done a lot of linkbuilding. Phone calls are tending to be a great resource in our niche. But I've got about 10 sites that I've called about ten times each and they're taking up a lot of time. I've mostly narrowed down who to contact but that person won't answer the phone. My question is, when do you give up on a good lead? Do I just try to contact a good person 5?, or 10? times then leave a message, leave a message a week later, then give up? I don't think leaving a message for content marketing in this case would help much. Thanks for the advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Pretty URLs... do they matter?
Given the following urls: example.com/warriors/ninjas/ example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01 Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nymbot0